For the purposes of this poll, it's really just all the asset management and faction-expansion gameplay that's at a larger scale than the RTS fleet-flinging.

These are the control features that would start to be useful once you lead a faction that controls, say, 10+ star systems. Around that point, rather than directing every action yourself and enjoying immediate results, you'd want to be able to start setting policies to be pursued by your lieutenants that (should) lead to a stable and (if you want) expanding empire over time.

So, basically, strategic empire management would be the phase of the game where you're acting indirectly for long-term results, rather than directly for near-immediate results.

There's no reason why a game with factions and a procedurally-expanding universe couldn't support this kind of play layered on top of the RTS gameplay. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's necessary for LT 1.0 (especially if player control of factions is not implemented in that version). But I believe it would be fun for a non-zero number of fans of Limit Theory.

Going by the poll results so far, apparently those "fans" are just me. I guess we'll see at some point.